Still Points North

January 1, 2013
Oprah.com deputy editor Newman looks back on her life, from her childhood in Alaska to her family life in New York. The author's parents divorced when she was young, and she spent the school months with her mother in Baltimore, Md., and her summers with her father and his new family in Alaska. After she graduated from college, Newman landed a job at a travel magazine that allowed her to take trips to Europe while keeping a small apartment in New York. The author expresses many thoughts about her relationship with her husband but more importantly, with her parents--her mother was a struggling single mother with three jobs who appeared to have mental or emotional imbalances, and her father was a hunter and fisherman, a lover of wildlife survival and outdoor activities. Newman expresses resentment toward her mother due to her odd behavior and toward her father for being temperamental. Her relationship with both of them, however, is mostly predictable and doesn't make for exciting reading; the same is true of her relationship with her husband, whom she left for a period because, as she repeats often, she was uncomfortable with commitment. She told him they should just stay married without saying much about the emotions that led to that moment. Her story and musings about why they got back together are not convincing or entertaining. The most interesting part of the book occurs at the beginning, in which the author describes outdoor life in Alaska. The subtitle is exaggerated. Other than the setting, Newman's story is fairly average.

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October 1, 2012

Deputy editor and head of books coverage at Oprah.com, Newman reports on a childhood in Alaska staring down bears and an adulthood spent staring down Mafia bosses in Russia. The upshot, she finds, is an almost defiant self-reliance--and an inability to open up to others. This memoir could change all that.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2013
As a child of divorce, Newman was raised on two coasts: fishing and camping with her father in Anchorage, and navigating museums and private school in Baltimore with her mother. Although she relishes sharing details of her wilderness adventures, it is the emotional turmoil wrought by the demise of her parent's marriage that dominates the book. Newman has crafted a vivid exploration of a broken family, recording episodes of hurt feelings, miscommunication, and more than a few emotional outbursts by a mother who struggled with her own history of parental trauma and a father whose choices did not always include the child from his first marriage. To be certain, there is more than one side to this story, and Newman's is steadfastly her own, full of the pathos all children endure when their lives are upturned. Her pain will resonate strongly with readers, and she vividly brings both Alaska and Maryland to life. She spares herself no mercy, making it clear that wounds from childhood take decades, and deep understanding, to heal. A natural for book clubs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)